David Lynch

Beyond his renown as an innovative, prize-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, overseer of productions, audio engineer, and woodworker, soundtracks formed an essential thread in David Lynch’s creative output. Buried inside the factory-like clamor of his initial full-length picture, Eraserhead from 1977, was the strangely affecting “In Heaven.” Lynch supplied its words, and the track—like nearly everything he touched—attained lasting cult status. Teaming with Angelo Badalamenti for the score of Blue Velvet in 1985 opened his eyes to music as a satisfying outlet; that film’s album established the signature Lynchian atmosphere of twangy guitars, layers of synthesizers, and ethereal singing, frequently supplied by Julee Cruise, merging into a wistful, oneiric fusion of the everyday and the uncanny. The music accompanying Twin Peaks, the cherished series Lynch created with Mark Frost, carried this aesthetic into broad popularity, its album earning gold certification stateside while Cruise’s rendition of the show’s theme “Falling” scored an international success. Lynch’s range later embraced blues, jazz, and avant-garde rock on efforts such as the 2001 John Neff collaboration Blue Bob, then shifted toward dark electronic pop with the 2011 solo debut Crazy Clown Time and 2013’s The Big Dream. The soundtrack for the long-delayed 2017 third season of Twin Peaks underscored the program’s enduring sonic legacy by reuniting Lynch, Badalamenti, and Cruise with younger musicians they had influenced. Subsequent Lynch projects proved varied and forward-looking, spanning partnerships with Flying Lotus and Donovan through 2024’s Cellophane Memories, a Chrystabell album that revisited the hallucinatory pop with which the journey began.

The earliest Lynch-associated recordings accompanied his debut feature, the profoundly disquieting 1977 film Eraserhead. The album combined the abrasive, post-industrial sonic textures crafted by Lynch and Alan Splet—who had first collaborated on the director’s 1970 short The Grandmother—alongside three Fats Waller numbers and “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song),” a spectral piece composed by Peter Ivers to Lynch’s lyrics; it surfaced in 1982. By then Eraserhead had cemented its place among the era’s defining cult films, while “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)” evolved into an underground-rock perennial later interpreted by Pixies, Devo, Tuxedomoon, and Faith No More.

Lynch’s trajectory in the early-to-mid 1980s brought both Academy Award recognition for The Elephant Man and setbacks with the poorly received adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. He answered by pursuing more intimate projects, beginning with the 1986 neo-noir Blue Velvet. That production initiated his longstanding partnership with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who scored nearly all of Lynch’s subsequent works, and marked his first encounter with vocalist Julee Cruise, another cornerstone of his sonic identity. When licensing This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren” proved prohibitive, Lynch and Badalamenti fashioned the comparably haunting “Mysteries of Love”; Badalamenti recruited Cruise, known to him from a country-and-western stage production, and her dreamy synthesis of electronics, strings, and voice turned the track into a cult favorite.

“Mysteries of Love” defined the continuing Lynch–Badalamenti–Cruise alliance. Their next venture was Cruise’s debut, September 1989’s Floating Into the Night, whose Badalamenti music and Lynch lyrics blended dream-pop with jazz yet attracted modest notice until the April 1990 premiere of Twin Peaks, which adopted an instrumental reading of the Floating single “Falling” as its theme. Capitalizing on the series’ stylish mystery, Floating Into the Night climbed to number 74 on the Billboard 200, charting additionally in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden and eventually receiving silver certification from the British Phonographic Industry in the U.K. Cruise’s “Falling” meanwhile topped Australia’s charts, reached the U.K. Top Ten, and peaked at number 11 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay tally. The Twin Peaks soundtrack, incorporating three Floating tracks plus Badalamenti’s atmospheric score, attained U.S. gold status; its instrumental “Falling” also captured the 1991 Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental. Concurrently Lynch and Badalamenti staged Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, a Brooklyn Academy of Music commission for the New Music America Festival featuring Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage, Michael J. Anderson, and Cruise; a filmed edition appeared in 1990. The trio extended their work to the 1992 feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Cruise’s October 1993 follow-up The Voice of Love, which preserved the hazy aesthetic of her debut while revisiting material from Fire Walk with Me, Industrial Symphony No. 1, and Lynch’s 1990 film Wild at Heart.

Later in the decade Lynch directed 1997’s Lost Highway, yet returned to music the following year with the ethereal Lux Vivens. This collaboration with Scottish vocalist and fiddler Jocelyn Montgomery, who had appeared in the 1997 documentary Pretty as a Picture, reinterpreted twelfth-century verses by Hildegard von Bingen through contemporary production conceived and engineered by Lynch, John Neff, and Mark Seagraves. While earning acclaim for The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, Lynch also issued October 2001’s Blue Bob, a collection of brooding experimental rock recorded with Neff; the pair reconvened for the 2002 single “Cannes Memory.” After several years issuing digital shorts online, Lynch returned to features with 2006’s Inland Empire, whose team introduced ongoing collaborators sound designer Dean Hurley and singer-songwriter Chrystabell, whose “Polish Poem” graced the soundtrack.

A cluster of Lynch-related releases emerged in 2007: the Inland Empire soundtrack, Twin Peaks Music: Season Two Music and More, the retrospective exhibition soundtrack The Air Is on Fire featuring Hurley, and Polish Night Music, a joint project with pianist-composer Marek Zebrowski. That year also saw Lynch’s solo debut single “Ghost of Love.” After establishing his own label in 2008, he issued Fox Bat Strategy: A Tribute to Dave Jaurequi, a 1994 recording with the group that performed in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, whose guitarists included Jaurequi and Smokey Hormel. Entering the 2010s, Lynch voiced Gus the Bartender on The Cleveland Show, joined Lee “Scratch” Perry and Dubblestandart for an EP, and contributed to Dark Night of the Soul, a multimedia installation realized with Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous alongside James Mercer, Gruff Rhys, Jason Lytle, Julian Casablancas, Frank Black, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson, Suzanne Vega, and Vic Chesnutt.

November 2011 brought Lynch’s first solo album, Crazy Clown Time. Its “electronic blues” was written and performed by Lynch and Hurley, with Lynch handling vocals except for Karen O’s cameo on “Pinky’s Dream.” The set reached number 12 on the U.K. Independent Albums chart and number three on Billboard’s Heatseekers Albums chart, also appearing on several European listings. Additional 2011 activities encompassed the Chrystabell album This Train and Lynch’s direction of Duran Duran’s concert at Los Angeles’ Mayan Theater. In 2012 he released The Twin Peaks Archive and the spoken memoir The Marriage of Picture and Sound; the following July came the second solo album The Big Dream, another blues-inflected work featuring Lykke Li that peaked at number five on Heatseekers Albums and number 20 on the U.K. Independent Albums Chart. Later that year the Bad the John Boy EP offered an unreleased track from those sessions plus a Venetian Snares remix of the title song. The Big Dream Remixes EP followed in 2014 as a limited Record Store Day edition. Two years later Lynch and Chrystabell issued Somewhere in the Nowhere, an EP that deepened the electronic palette and darkened the mood of their signature dream-pop.

Lynch revisited Twin Peaks in 2017 with the third season, Twin Peaks: The Return. Alongside further Badalamenti collaborations, the series incorporated Hurley’s ambient textures and his drumming in the fictional band Trouble, which also featured Lynch’s son Riley on guitar and Dirty Beaches’ Alex Zhang Hungtai on tenor saxophone. Cruise returned to sing “The World Spins” on Twin Peaks [Music from the Limited Event Series], while Chrystabell portrayed FBI agent Tammy Preston. A further Twin Peaks-related release arrived in 2018 as Thought Gang, an archive of early-’90s experimental jazz- and funk-inflected pieces by Lynch and Badalamenti, some of which had surfaced in Fire Walk with Me and The Return. In 2020 Lynch appeared on “Fire Is Coming” from Flying Lotus’ Flamagra; the following year he produced Donovan’s “I Am the Shaman,” issued on the songwriter’s seventy-fifth birthday. Lynch reunited with Chrystabell for July 2024’s Cellophane Memories, recorded over twelve months at Asymmetrical Studio with Lynch producing and Chrystabell engineering; experimental editing lent a hallucinatory quality to its torch-song material. That year Lynch disclosed his emphysema diagnosis, and in January 2025 he died at age 78.